<i></i>Traveling Sociabilities and Empire in Eighteenth-Century Literature<i></i>

<p><i>Traveling Sociabilities </i>intervenes in the fields of eighteenth-century, postcolonial, and sociability studies by analyzing literary episodes where sociable formations, such as consecrated ideas of “politeness” and “sensibility,” travel to critical contact zones of difference. <i>Traveling Sociabilities</i> foregrounds those literary representations of sociability that disturb the insularity of the British landscape and explores the reciprocal influence of racial, religious, and national difference on the volatile notion of British national and imperial identity. By focusing on the discursive and formal construction of chosen literary texts, <i>Traveling Sociabilities </i>maps the ways in which eighteenth-century sociable communities were debating the views, interests, and influences of various kinds of otherness in relation to their own imagination of British national and imperial futurity. <i>Traveling Sociabilities</i> includes chapters on literary texts such as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s <i>Turkish Embassy Letters </i>(1718-1724; printed 1763)<i>, </i>Tobias Smollett’s <i>The Expedition of Humphry Clinker</i> (1771),<i> </i>Olaudah Equiano’s <i>The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano </i>(1789).</p>